>From the Abstract of
SOME MAGNIFICENT ACADEMIC TRUSELS AND THEIR SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES by John N.
Warfield.
A "trusel" is an idea or a finding that is widely
perceived to be true, but which is largely useless (or even of
negative value). (The idea that a truth may lack value may
be disturbing, but it is true, although it is not a
trusel.)
A "Magnificent Academic Trusel" is one that has been
widely acknowledged for its intellectual content
(explicitly or implicitly), but without a corresponding
amount of attention being given to its utility or even to its
potential negative value for society. The negative value
may come from commission or omission. It may deal
with the content of a discipline, with the way a
discipline is perceived, with knowledge that cuts across
disciplines, and even with "integrative studies".
Some selected trusels with possibly serious social
consequences will be discussed. Among these are Gödel's
Theorem about incompleteness of languages, the idea that
"interdisciplinarity" should have an important place
in the language of academia, the thought that in teaching
language the prose form alone is of great value and
should command most of the teaching attention and
resources, the idea that mathematics is a science instead
of a language, the idea that it is all right to use the
name "science" indiscriminately to name academic programs
(such as "management science" and "computer science")
without any stated criteria whereby this
nomenclature is validated, and that people with little or
no "academic track record" should be given significant
power to allocate academic and research resources, or to
make key public decisions affecting higher education.
Examples of serious and inappropriate consequences that
have ensued from such trusels will be discussed,
and a strategy for dealing with them in the future will be
offered.
http://u2.gmu.edu:8080/dspace/bitstream/1920/3328/1/Warfield_50_15_A1b.pdf
Its proving to be a longer and longer way across that divide. The bloody
Grand Canyon.
REH
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2010 1:25 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Re: science and myth ( Re: Comments)
Pete wrote:
> I think you want to be using the word "scientism". It is a very useful
> word.
Yeah, I know that word. Only nobody would ever admit to being an
adherent of scientism; they'd think, if I asked, that I was accusing
them of belonging to a weird cult. And the popular dogmata of
scientism are so heterogeneous as to belie the specious unity of a
single name, anyhow. The Church of Universal Schismatic Scientism,
Heterodox.
> Scientism is to science as truthiness is to truth.
Yes. Very good. I like that.
> I do like your explanation of the mechanism of the scanning
> tunneling microscope, it works for me. I'd only edit that the
> electrons are detected by simply measuring the electric current
> which flows from the probe tip to the subject surface.
Ah, well, that obscures the whole point, which was that the
theory-conformant and experimentally demonstrable operation of the
STEM so dramatically violates good sense that, like the rube gazing up
at his first giraffe, one is inclined to say, "They ain't no such
animal."
See, if you have a specimen teenager, on Saturday afternoon you might
well say something like, "He's probably at his girlfriend's house or
else at the beach." You imply that there are two canonical "places"
and that there is a probability distribution for the teenager between
GF's house and beach. But in fact, at all times the teenager is
*somewhere*. [1] He may, in fact be in neither of the two allowed
places but in that case we know -- believe with unshakable conviction
-- then he is continuously present at a sequence of points in between.
That's why we call it "the continuum, after all.
But those electrons, well, they weren't, with certainty, on the pointy
thing anyway. They were just probably there and extremely improbably
on the other thing. At some point, some electrons that probably were
on the pointy thing become more probably on the other thing, where
they are then observed. If you lose all the "probably"s from that
semantic mare's nest, then electrons that were on one side of the gap
instantaneously stop being there and start being on the other side of
the gap. They're never in continuous transit in the intevening space.
And I have a hard time thinking of that as a flow of current, even if
you *can* measure it. It's as if a million teenagers were at the A&W
drive-in in town and then, when the surf came up, a few thousand
vanished and instantaneously re-appeared at the beach. How could you
then measure the traffic between A&W the beach?
Sorry. I'm dragging us all even further off-topic. There is this: it
seems that it's easier to talk convincingly about the arcana of
science that I admittedly don't understand than it is to contribute
constructivly to a dialog about the societal problems that this list
aspires to address in some useful way.
I have ripe tomatoes to pick....
- Mike
---
PS:
PV>
http://t2k-canada.nd280.org/Conferences/cap2010/wilking_cap2010.pdf/at_downl
oad/file
7 Meg, too big a gulp for my feeble dial-up connection. Too bad.
My only affair with neutrinos has been speculative and purely
aesthetic.
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/gallery/tuns-gates.html
Is the smooth/lumpy distribution of neutrinos in the universe
still an open question, Pete?
For that matter (going even further astray) if the Higgs is what
gives other things mass, do neutrinos just have fewer Higgses
than, say, protons? Or what? Inquiring minds want to know, even
when they don't expect to understand the answer.
[1] "Everybody gotta be *somewhere*" as the wino said when rousted
from the park bench. Not true, apparently, for electrons.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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